Stuff

The Times this morning had new polling on the junior doctors strike (the fieldwork was completed shortly before the strike later this month was called off). It shows that more of the public support the strike than oppose it, but only just, and that support has fallen significantly since earlier in the year.

42% of people said they thought junior doctors were right to go on strike (down from 53% when the question was last asked in April), 38% think they are wrong (up from 29%). While people still think the government are more to blame for the dispute ending in industrial action, support for the strike is clearly flagging.

The decision to move to five day long strikes also looks risky in terms of public support. 34% of the public say they support junior doctors taking five day strike action, 48% of people say they are opposed.

The Tories weren’t always opposed to devolution eg Heath’s Declaration of Perth and Home’s intervention in the 1979 referendum to encourage people to vote no to get a better Tory alternative to Labour’s proposals!

@”No, I didn’t mean local elections, but about working out a strategy to win the general election locally”

I don’t really understand that. General Elections are won on the basis of National Campaigns & Manifestos .

@”The diversity of the UK (or England) is such that generic, yet concrete, left of the centre economic (or for that matter social) policies cannot be verbalised effectively without a massive scale of changes in the LP that is highly unlikely”

I understand this even less………Labour can’t communicate Left of Centre policies because the UK Electorate is………..too “diverse”. ! ?

Well if that is so-Labour under Corbyn is dead nationally-an opinion set out by the Editor of the Bible of The Left-The New Statesman today. In an article entitled ” The Left’s Surrender to Comrade Corbyn” , Jason Cowley has some interesting views on Theresa May’s Government in his concluding paragraphs:-

There are a number of differences between the polling companies that are interesting.

The Conservatives look strong in both of their graphs. Given a new PM and ‘Brexit means Brexit’, this seems to mirror UKIPs edge downwards. Are UKIPs former Tories coming home?

Without a doubt, Labour have declined in both sets post referendum. Is it Labour’s EU position or just the massive overhang of JC and the Labour infighting?

The Lib Dems seem to have improved a little, perhaps the gains in local elections are slowly bleeding through. Party revivals do tend to begin in local politics first. ICM have an greater Lib Dem improvement. alongside a bigger Labour decline.

The Greens show a small uptick post referendum too.

The SNP have grown since February.

It looks like a pro-European stance has helped the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP, yet hasn’t helped Labour. Maybe it would have, but the Leadership issues have just obliterated these gains.

UKIP look like they need to firm up a post-referendum reason-to-be. The noises from them suggests it’s Labour votes they are chasing, not Conservative ones.

The more you think about all of this, the bigger the mountain the Labour Leadership winner seems to face.

Interesting analysis. A good example of unsupervised learning it’d certainly be interesting to learn more about their methodology rather than “Through a cluster analysis…” better still would be getting their raw data to see how much these “tribes” move around depending on which subset of the data you feed it.

It’s interesting to see where the centre ground is in relation to the average person,

It’s interesting to see how few voters are swing voters without strong opinions as the common example of left right and swing voter as monolithic blocks breaks down. Being “centre ground” doesn’t necessarily mean you are fair game for both labour and conservatives.

I wonder if similar questions might be used in the future to determine someones “tribe” for weighting purposes, obviously a similar survey would need to be done regularly to see if the balance of tribes has changed (or if new tribes have formed and replaced the old).

It might be that it it’s a better way to identify voters as peoples “tribe” are less likely to change faster than voting intention, they might change their views on a single topic but it’s unlikely that enough views will change to push them from one category to another, also people will be more certain (and maybe honest) about their views than the would about prior voting habits.

It’s interesting to see how many “tribes” Corbyn has to win over.

A pity the formatting of the bar charts for demographics and attitudes was pretty messed up as it’s a bit weird to see such errors in a publication, someone should have tidied that up.

Yes, it would be good to see a bit more of the wiring, but nonetheless , the segmentation itself makes some sense.

Join it up with the last few paras of the New Statesman article Colin highlighted; and it’s not so hard to see how Theresa May could be making a direct pitch to attract the “Community” tribe, as well as the Labour voters in the more obviously rightward segments.

Don’t they change ?-don’t constituencies swing from being safe through relatively safe to marginal-and perhaps back again.?

To say that GE X was effectively won in ABC& D marginals because the rest of constituencies in that year had larger majorities , doesn’t render the National General Election Campaign irrelevant. The latter will have had effect in every constituency-and to argue that it uniquely had no effect in Marginals in a given GE would require proof that specifically local issues were paramount in those Constituencies in those years.

…anyway this all came from my failure to understand how your idea of ” a strategy to win the general election locally” would-or indeed could work.

I’m not sure about the referendum effect (wish we had YouGov data), but otherwise, the trends you described are clear (it’s even clearer, though statistically more suspect, on a log scale).

And yes, your conclusion is the one that could have the major effect. We have some LP wing that says that look at this wall, it cannot be scaled, while the other wing: oh, it’s only a mole hill. And in reality it is a huge hill that requires extreme focus, and more or less error free actions. Don’t hold your breath.

@”Join it up with the last few paras of the New Statesman article Colin highlighted; and it’s not so hard to see how Theresa May could be making a direct pitch to attract the “Community” tribe, as well as the Labour voters in the more obviously rightward segments.”

Indeed.

What follows is a pretty big question about Corbyn’s hidden majority of DNV s who have been awaiting a Coalition of the Left.
If I read the Opinium “Tribes” pie chart correctly-they total 24%. 31% max if he gets every swing voter.

I have on occasion spoken to very committed hard left people. They were so convinced of their own righteousness and that anyone to the right was either evil or a dupe, that they honestly believed that if they could just get their message out to the voters they would sweep the country. I suppose that’s where the hidden voter idea comes from. “Surely they MUST support us, because we’re right.”

Without the wiring we don’t know how stable these groupings are, which is quite a bit dependent on sample size as a rule of thumb.

A simple test would be to take a random 90% of the sample, fit your 8 groups to that, and repeat. If you get the same groupings each time you refit, then you can fit 8 groupings, if not then you might want to consider fewer groupings.

I agree that is where May is targeting, she doesn’t need to win it over completely but if she can make inroads there it’ll make things very tough for the future for Labour.

I can’t see which other groups Corbyn is targeting. There certainly isn’t any hint at attracting anyone in the “New Britain” or “Free Liberals”. (Which seem so close that 7 tribes might be as good a fit).

I guess a question is if Labour split, which of the other tribes could the other Labour hope to represent.

It’s certainly why the conservatives look stable at 40%+, theres no one not in Corbyn’s 2.5 tribes who he is trying to attract.

CambridgeRachel – “Its actually really sad that we can joke about buying peerages, low level corruption has become so normal that its just a wry joke”

In the early 20th century David Lloyd George was selling peerages on an industrial scale that makes the modern world look squeaky clean. He reckoned that it was was the cleanest form of fundraising because the new peers only wanted a title they could list on their dinner party invitations, they didn’t want to influence policy (yes they could sit in the Lords, but most just didn’t bother).

Does anyone care that Lloyd George sold peerages? Does anyone care that he cheated on his wife and maintained a mistress, for that matter? He’s remembered affectionately for inventing state pensions and unemployment benefit.

Sometimes people fixate on moral issues that don’t really affect them personally, and ignore the big issues that do.

I suppose that’s where the hidden voter idea comes from. “Surely they MUST support us, because we’re right.”

To be fair, it’s a characteristic of most politically-committed people, not just the ultra left. We’re generally pretty bad at understanding why other people don’t support the same things we do; and we have a tendency to think that if only we could expose them more effectively to the obvious and uncontestable truth of what we already know, we’d win.

It’s only the biased media, or the other side’s outrageous and malevolent propaganda, or the selfishness and stupidity of the “sheeple” that stops our side sweeping to well-deserved and perpetual victory.

I didn’t (and won’t!) try do any systematic analysis but, with all the usual caveats about geographical (and other) crossbreaks, there appeared to be the correlation you would expect between the Brexit/Remain voters and a number of attitudes.

For example, Scotland, NI and London had a lot more support for “Britain has a lot to learn from the rest of the world” as opposed to “Britain has much to teach the rest of the world”, while England (outwith London) took the contrary view.

There will be a causal factor in there somewhere! but which way round does it work?

Re the discussion on English education last night, I noted that while 58% of UK thought that creating a more equal society was a “good thing”, in Scotland 71% supported that idea.

The attitudinal positions taken by people (and hence the “tribe” they belong to) are fundamental to their political choices – and most politicians have an instinctive understanding for that. However, the same insight into the local tribes may not be apparent to those who set party agendas.

Her great grandfather was a completely dispreputable businessman, who had a conviction, but he handed over money to Lloyd George and got his baronetcy. George V then writes to Lloyd George protesting this, but then it turns out that not only had Lloyd George approved it, but the suggestion had come from Churchill (who was a Liberal at the time) who mentioned that he’d received an approach and the man was prepared to pay £5000! Poor old King George V had to suck it up.

Our era really is quite innocent compared to the goings on in the past.

Carfrew: “Not seeing how talk of air traffic arrivals will inject more steam. Not as much as synths anyway…”

Yeah, was bit of a lead balloon. But the posting rate was under one an hour at the time, so I thought the time might be ripe for a bit of air traffic data. Clearly not.

Maybe time for another try? I was interested to be asked by Yougov the other day what month my birthday was in. And if I could choose, what month would I want it to be in?

As it happens, I’m very happy with late May and wouldn’t choose any other time. But I wonder who wanted that question asked? And I wonder what the answers will be. I suspect Spring/Summer will be the popular months, and Dec/Jan the duds.

“Yeah, but you have to be Baron Carfrew of Somewhere very small, insignificant, and unfashionable.”

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I thought he point of buying a peerage was to bypass the tricky business of getting a peerage by being titled, or even of having suitable expertise for the upper chamber to benefit from. If you have to become titled and pay as well, that seems like a bit of a rum deal all round really. Amazing no one’s picked up on it…

“On being reminded of the GE vote numbers , she told me that “people” hadn’t “thought about” their vote enough.”

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Well it can happen. I know this is hard to believe, but some people voting Leave didn’t even know about passporting and the potential threat to our banking hegemony. Some peeps North of the border thought oil prices wouldn’t go below ninety dollars!! Amazing innit…

David Davis has said that we probably can’t control the movement of people from the EU and be part of the EU free trade area. Australia and the USA are prepared to consider free trade agreements with us but not ahead of the EU. No one else appears keen and Japan might even be seen as rude. Mrs May does not appear too keen on China and is in danger of insulting them if she has not done hat already. Dr Fox says that British Industry is too lazy to increase exports we urgently need. Nigel Farage has resigned, Boris Johnson is strangely silent, Mr Gove is no more to be seen, and Mrs May is playing her Brexit cards close to her chest. Meanwhile the Brussels bureaucrats are rumoured to be rubbing their hands at what they take to be our disarray.

So on the face of it the Brexit project is facing severe problems without any clear plan or identifiable leadership. But on the other hand nothing feels wrong, the sun shines, we continue to spend and the public are not apparent sign of unease. Is this ostrich-like behaviour or British phlegm and good sense?

“Yeah, was bit of a lead balloon. But the posting rate was under one an hour at the time, so I thought the time might be ripe for a bit of air traffic data. Clearly not.”

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Yes, well, you’re not an expert on lead balloons, like some of us. And anyways, air traffic arrivals is a bit tame, on a board that can spend hours on a weekend talking about road numbering conventions.

Regarding birthdays, might have changed mine ‘cos was a summer birth, which meant you were usually the youngest in the class and your birthday fell in the school holidays when peeps weren’t around…

I agree. Maybe my parents would have compared it with the “phoney war” from Sept 39 until the invasion of France in Spring 1940. The enormity of Brexit – and its threat to the UK – is not yet fully understood, as the threat from Hitler was underestimated until he swept round the Maginot Line and cut off the BEF. The media are behaving as if it is they are under an unwritten obligation to downplay any bad news already arriving, such as a de facto Devaluation which will reignite inflation, the end of interest rates for modest savers, and negative inward investment decisions (eg Ford at Bridgend).

Although it may seem unlikely to most people at present I wonder if the Brexit fall-out could ultimately usher in not an Election, but a grand Coalition in order to preserve public morale and order ? Just what does this Government propose to do when the public refuse to accept the kind of consequences of which so-called Project Fear warned – eg large falls in the buying powers of wages and pensions as several crucial manufacturing and service industries all lose major markets at the same time ?

IMHO we ain’t seen nothing yet …

What it may teach us in the longer term is how useless Referenda are in trying to solve extraordinarily complex problems. They were just a short term fix for Cameron. Which fixed nothing.

Charles,
“So on the face of it the Brexit project is facing severe problems without any clear plan or identifiable leadership. But on the other hand nothing feels wrong, the sun shines, we continue to spend and the public are not apparent sign of unease. Is this ostrich-like behaviour or British phlegm and good sense?”

It’s because Brexit hasn’t happened, and no one (not even the Leave campaign) has any idea what Brexit will mean anyway.

It’s like the period you often get in continental PR parliamentary elections after the votes have been counted but before a governing coalition has been formed. Because there are many viable combinations of parties that could produce a majority, and the creation of a government can mean a long tortuous series of behind-closed-doors negotiations, no one knows what to feel in the wake of the results.

@Welsh Borderer – “Just what does this Government propose to do when the public refuse to accept the kind of consequences of which so-called Project Fear warned – eg large falls in the buying powers of wages and pensions as several crucial manufacturing and service industries all lose major markets at the same time ?”

I was thinking tonight about how sometimes the big issues remain unseen by the electorate, but it’s much smaller and relatively unimportant issues that seem to wake people up.

Even as the big macroeconomic issues you mentioned affect people, I doubt the clear connection with Brexit will be made in the minds of many voters. We’re had recessions before, and the overall economic picture is so complex that even if things go badly wrong, many voters still might not make the link with Brexit. Unless the impacts were felt the day after Brexit, which never happens with these factors, I suspect many people will fail to make the connection.

Instead, I rather think that unexpected things more directly connecting people to the issues matter more. I posted last night about the new EU travel plans for countries that didn’t need visas. It looks highly likely now that once we leave the EU, we will have to apply online for permission to enter the EU each time we go, and pay a £10 fee.

This sounds small, but there were 50m individual visits from UK to the EU in 2014, so that’s a lot of people handing over £10. It’s an irritant that can easily be directly attributed to Brexit.

I suspect that ultimately this is the kind of issue that will spread unease about the result, rather than the big economic numbers, which tend to be so big no one sees them.